Maybe it’s because I’m female. Or maybe it’s because I’m a prude, or, who knows what it is, but I always find it troubling when sex tourism gets treated more with irony than outrage.

Gonzo travel guys seem to visit these places and merely raise an ironic eyebrow over their tourist priced beer while not being particularly bothered one way or the other about the fate of underaged prostitutes or women who make money by writing banners with markers stuffed in … oh, you get it.

It disappoints me when these otherwise funny, smart, insightful, (many positive adjectives here) seem to give sex tourism a get out of scrutiny free card.

I have to read the sections in question in “Smile When You’re Lying” again to confirm this is correct and that I’ve not put the book down with a false impression.

That’s all I’ve got by way of criticism about Chuck Thompson’s hilarious, painful, scathing, and again hilarious book.

It was especially excruciating to read it following our press junket. We both indulged in and were victims of all the things Thompson takes down in his book – the freebies, the PR rep hosted cocktail hours, the nonexistent support for our trip from the publisher, and still, I sit at my desk every day involved in the terrible evil of writing noncritical prose about our destination.

Take That, Rick Steves

Forgive me, Thompson, for I have sinned, and am surrounded by sinners.

I spent the two days it took me to read the book – I could not put it down – alternating between groaning and laughing. Thompson takes potshots at travel writers, editors, expats, English teachers abroad, the programs that sponsor them, Paul Theroux, and the nicest guy in travel, Rick Steves. Rick Steves! Who takes shots at Rick Steves?

Sadly, he’s right on with most of it. Most commercial travel writing is insipid. Real travel stories, those about getting ripped off by four Catholic schoolgirl types or the ridiculous things expats will do to cope with the crippling boredom of being isolated in a culture not your own (a-hem) never make it to ink.

Editors need to sell ad space to hotels and airlines and oh, Expedia, and stories of your (you thought) near death at the roadside are not going to encourage readers to travel.

True story: I once wrote a story about the lodge out on Lake Quinalt on the Olympic Peninsula. It’s a lovely place, but they gave us a room with no view (fine) over the kitchen (noisy). I gave the place a decent review – it’s a nice place, actually – but I also suggested that visitors might want make sure they’re not over the kitchen or the restaurant.

The editor killed that remark, and it wasn’t because of the word count. I also wrote a piece about sailing in which I opened with my great dislike of watercraft, but that got reworked to. First person adventure, be gone! All of a sudden, I love boats. Dude. I hate boats.

No Spin Zone

I loved the writing in this book. Thompson spins a travel tale the way it should be done, leaving out none of the good stuff that sets the scene, glossing over none of the ugly details sitting just off screen.

He’s got unflinching nerve – talk about biting the hand that feeds you – doesn’t spare himself when it comes to criticism, and he’s just plain funny. Smile When You’re Lying is a great read for expats, travel writers, wanna be travel writers, and people who think travel writers have it easy. Hilarious.

Sidebar thing I’m pysched about: You don’t read that stuff in magazines, but the sheer mass of Travel Stories on the Web means that the stories are getting told. They’re hard to find in all the noise, but while publishers are overlooking them, travelers are telling them on their own. Woot for that.

Hey, I’d like to give you my copy of this book. The PR folks sent me a review copy and now, I’d like to give it away. If you want it, here’s how you get it:

Post a link to your “never gonna be published” travel or expat story in the comments on my site. We’ll pick our favorite at the NEV HQ and send you the book. (Hmmm. Maybe we’ll do a reader vote depending on how many entries are posted. Stay tuned.)

You’ve got until January 2nd to post your links, I’ll send the winner my copy of the book sometime after that. If you can’t stand to wait, you can buy Smile When You’re Lying here.

Pam Mandel is a freelance writer and the travel editor for BlogHer. She blogs about travel, seafood, the ukulele, and more at Nerd’s Eye View.

We went round the room asking each other “Was machst du von Beruf?” – “What’s your profession?”

The term “von Beruf” implies a sort of education and authority underlying your occupation. Your “Beruf” is the thing you studied in university or the skill you trained for in the technical college. In addition to your profession, you have your day job, the real thing you do to get your money.

So, putting it all together, if you’re in a class of displaced humans from the war torn Balkans, you’ll find that you have a young woman who’s an economist von Beruf, but works as a chambermaid.

Or a man who’s an electrical engineer von Beruf but feeds his family by working on the production line at the commercial dairy. (This situation will not only humble you speechless but also give you the opportunity to learn the word “Fliesbandarbeiter” – assembly line worker.)

I had a lot of trouble with the “von Beruf” concept. I work as a technical writer, but I don’t know that I’d call it my profession. I fell in to it completely by accident. I have no training.

By now, I have many years experience, but in a society that is obsessed with credentials, I’m an anomaly.

A Professional Artist

I asked an Austrian friend who’s a schoolteacher about this “Beruf” thing. She said that I’m an artist “von Beruf” but my work is tech writing. Okay, but calling myself an artist “von Beruf” sounds hollow to me. Sure, I have a fine arts degree. But I stopped painting when I gave up my studio.

Also, while I had a fair exhibit history and did actually sell some work, I always had to have another job to pay the rent. Thirdly, for me, art isn’t a profession. It’s a calling like joining the clergy.

No sensible person goes to art school thinking they’re going to make a profession out of it. And if they do, it’s well wrung out of them by the time they graduate and have to make student loan payments.

Husband said that I could say I’d retrained to be a technical writer, which is sort of true. (He’s not a good source of career lingo, though. Apparently, when asked as a very young lad what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “Retired.”)

In a handy twist, I actually like working as a tech writer, but it’s not clear to me if I like the work or I like the independence that it affords me – it’s perfect freelance work and means I have plenty of time to not work, too.

The Perfect Profession

If I had to pick a profession now, it would be something like “Going places, looking at stuff, taking pictures, and writing some things down.” I could totally be a professional vacationer. Though there’s something specific about vacationing that implies flights and hotels and sightseeing guides, which is not what I mean at all.

I’m quite skilled at squandering vast amounts of time on leisure activities, hiking and reading, to name two, but there is no profession for those things. I think I could be quite a good professional blogger too, but Nerd’s Eye View (my blog) refuses to cough up any sort of income.

This “von Beruf” thing has made me thankful that my identity is not tied up in my profession, because I would find it confusing and probably very disappointing. I don’t work in my field of study, and I lack credentials for the work I do to make a living.

Plus, the stuff I want to do isn’t really an occupation or a profession. Though I think the French have a very nice word for it: Flaneuse. That’s the female version of flaneur, a person who swans about doing, well, not all that much really.

Hanging about in cafes, admiring the landscape, maybe scribbling self-indulgent multi-lingual thoughts in a journal. This is something I’ve been training for my entire life.

Ich bin Flaneuse von Beruf. Yup. That sounds about right.

The post was originally published here. Reprinted with permission.

Pam Mandel is a freelance writer and the travel editor for BlogHer. She blogs about travel, seafood, the ukulele, and more at Nerd’s Eye View.

Authenticity. It’s the buzzword of the enlightened traveler. We seek the genuine experience, something unspoiled by commercialism or prior visitors; we seek the perfect interaction with the culture we’re visiting.

Maybe our fantasy is to be adopted by a tribe, to receive some kind of acknowledgment that we’re not just another camera-toting white-shoe wearing tourist. Maybe it’s to have a time travel moment, to visit a land seemingly unspoiled by progress.

Maybe we want to boldly go where no man has gone before. We are out of luck.

For some reason, writing about authenticity in travel has been flying across my radar lately. I read stories punctuated with introspective commentary about polluted cultures or an inability to leave our world behind.

I’m starting to think we are missing the point.

The Inescapable Us

We live in a small world. In a day and a half, we can be in the African bush, with a Hmong hill tribe, in the Moscow subway.

Visas and politics not withstanding, the world is open to us. If our bodies and minds can be there, our global policies and influences are there too.

And we tend to really enjoy things like Internet access and indoor plumbing, which got there the same way we did. I suspect we prefer a somewhat sanitized authenticity.

The word authenticity implies a genuine, distilled sort of experience, a kind of transitory purity that may exist somewhere, but will be gone as soon as we lay our eyes on it.

Some time back I watched an episode of Globe Trekker where the host visited a tree house dwelling tribe in – oh, was it New Guinea? And I remember seeing western t-shirts on some of the tribe, left behind by the last camera crew, perhaps?

Sure, travel companies will charge you a lot of money to offer up a “real” experience, but what you’re purchasing is no more or less authentic for its exclusivity.

A Return Home

Here in Seattle you can take a ferry out to an island and attend a “genuine” Native American powwow, with salmon bake and native dances – but the powwow we stumbled into last summer had a fun fair and roller coasters.

There was a salmon bake and dancing, but also, cotton candy and fairground games where you could win a giant pale pink teddy bear. Was it less authentic?

The strip malls of Vegas are no less real than the Kingdom of Bhutan. We have to stop being offended by the Bob Marley cassettes, no, the Pearl Jam CDs, left behind by the last generation of travelers and take it as part of the experience.

It is what is real now and when we travel we are in it. We are both cause and effect of this perceived lack of authenticity.

We’re relying on our destinations to provide it, but it’s Shangri-la, it’s Atlantis, it’s Brigadoon and Camelot. You can’t get there from here.

The best we can hope for is to be authentic in our travels. Wherever we go, there we are.

This post was originally published on Nerd’s Eye View. Reprinted with permission.

Pam Mandel is a freelance technical writer, as well as the travel editor for BlogHer. She keeps her own personal blog of photography and musing’s at Nerd’s Eye View.

What do you think about culture and authenticity?

For months now, I’ve been traveling the blogophere seeking out the interesting, the obscure, the obscene from the world of travel bloggers.

Good lord, there’s a lot of us out there. Seeing so many blogs, it’s natural that I’ve developed a marked preference for certain characteristics.

Even though I have absolutely no editorial “cred” other than my reading habits, I’m going to scribble a brief rundown of what catches my eye and what makes me click away.

There’s truckloads of text out there on how to write about travel, but hey, what’s stopping me from adding to it? These are my opinions only (I have plenty of those!) so take it for what it’s worth, my two cents, etc.

Make it physically readable, for starters.

I can’t read pink text on a yellow background, for example. And sometimes, wow, there is so much going on that I can barely find the text. Which leads me to…

Minimize the design toys, please.

Everyone wants a custom blog, but if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you just end up with noise. There are plenty of perfectly acceptable templates to use, it’s not a crime to use them, especially if you’re a good writer. I want to read you, not hire you as a designer.

Reading itineraries is really boring, unless they’re mine.

I skip right over blogs that list where the writer went without telling me anything about what happened there. These things get hidden in entries – first we went to the Museum, then the park, then we took the subway back to the old part of the city…. Meh. Doesn’t tell me anything. What did you do, see, eat there?

Turns out I do want to see a picture of you, who knew?

I love the surprise of seeing that some big dude in a Hawaiian shirt and a silly hat is writng culturally sensitive stories about visiting holy sites. Or some hard core outdoor climber is a woman of a “certain age.”

Speaking of pictures, bring ‘em.

It’s nice when there are thumbnails in the posts, or a single photo up top, and then, after reading, I can click through to an album. I don’t care for it when people use a linear blog format for photoblogs, however, there are better ways to present photos only. If you’re keeping a photoblog, use a tool that’s designed for it, not one that’s designed for text.

Negativity can be okay as long as it’s not cultural imperialism.

“Oh my god, I ate the most disgusting thing ever!” is all right as long as it’s followed by a description of what the thing was and how it’s a local specialty and how you had the nerve to try it. Props to you for being adventurous. Just don’t diss the locals, man.

Too much introspection?

“I was thinking about my friends back home and how they were so not having this experience that was totally changing me and everything is different now…” Click. Next please. I get that travel can equal huge transformation, but I’d much rather read about how that transformation is being experienced.

Is that too woo woo to make sense? Maybe. Maybe you get what I mean. Ditto for irony and uber-coolness. What’s the point in traveling if you’re going to spend too much time inside your own head instead of what’s happening in front of you?

Gimme the details!

I absolutely want to read about how the waiter looked like he was wearing his Grandmother’s wig, that his hair could so not have been real, or how the train station smelled of cigarettes and pee and oddly, roses. Good travel writing doesn’t miss the little things hovering in the corners in the background.

Take me with you.

This is difficult to define and quantify, but good travel writing makes the reader feel like they’re on the trip too. Put me in the car, on the bus, next to you on the plane. I really want to be there, so take me with you. No, seriously, take me with you. I can be ready to go in, like, 20 minutes.

What are some other criteria that make a great travel blog? Are there any amazing travel blogs you’re following right now?